The biggest “problem” with the Bible is that its historical narrative is clearly meant to be taken literally.

True, there are parts of the Bible that are poetic or symbolic in nature. But most of the Bible, including its opening chapters, is written in the language of straightforward historical narrative. Moreover, whenever the Bible references previous events, it is clear the authors of the later books or the people being written about at a later time viewed those events as having literally happened in their past.

This of course is not a problem for those who are skeptical of and therefore comfortable rejecting the Bible’s truth claims. But if the goal is to reconstruct the Christian faith for disaffected believers, we must avoid watering down the faith or trying to explain away the Bible instead of just explaining it.

Critical to understanding why the Bible is meant to be taken literally is the fact that the ancient Jews were a highly literal people. This doesn’t come across in our Bibles as much as it should, because we translate it abstractly. Here are a few examples:

• 1 Samuel 20:34 is translated as “Jonathan arose from the table in fierce anger.” However, the Hebrew literally says, “Jonathan arose from the table in the burning of his nose.” This is a highly literal depiction of what happens to us physically when we are fiercely angry.
• When the Jews said, “west side” (as in Exodus 27:12), they literally said, “the sea side,” because the sea was to the west.
• The Jewish word for “breath” (as in 2 Samuel 22:16) literally means “wind.” Sit quietly in a room and breathe in and out for a bit, and you will see why the idea of breath as a breeze blowing back and forth is a highly literal, almost simplistic description.
• “Bronze serpent” (as in Numbers 21:9) is a pun, because the two words are from the same Hebrew root. The implication is that, when Adam named the serpent, he saw that it looked like living bronze and said, “I will call this animal ‘Bronzie.’”

Given all this, when evaluating the historical narrative of the Bible (especially the creation story), it becomes untenable to believe that Bible fundamentalists are guilty of taking it too literally. The Hebrews were so literal that they struggled to express abstraction. There is no way the Book of Genesis (for example) is some kind of totally abstract fable striving to capture the spiritual essence of whatever happened literally in the beginning of mankind.

Furthermore, contrary to a common attempted workaround, the language of Genesis 1 isn’t even obviously poetic. It seems to be a description of an ordered construction project. There should be some indication, some metaphorical clue in the text, if it isn’t meant to be taken literally. Also, if the language were poetic, we would expect some kind of clarification elsewhere in the Bible about what actually happened in the beginning (since the Bible authors were so obsessed with providing a detailed historical narrative from creation to Jesus). Instead, references to it elsewhere (such as Exodus 20:11) take it as literal. Thus, so must we.

The Bible is therefore intended to be taken literally, and if it isn’t literal truth, it isn’t much more than a historically important and occasionally sage collection of human literature. You could study it academically, but you couldn’t build a faith around it.

The important question then becomes: why is the Bible so seemingly in conflict with the majority of Western science and historical scholarship? Furthermore, why is it so seemingly in conflict with itself? Well, let’s explore a few considerations.

First, regarding internal conflict, the Bible is not always meant to be taken stupidly literally. In other words, the most obvious literal interpretation based on the most superficial reading of the text is sometimes wrong. Occasionally you have to dig deeper to figure out how the Bible harmonizes with itself.

For example, the most obvious literal interpretation of Genesis 15:13 is that the Hebrews were slaves in Egypt for 400 years, while the most obvious literal interpretation of Exodus 12:40 is that the Hebrews spent 430 years in Egypt after Jacob moved his family to Goshen. However, there is plentiful evidence in the rest of the Bible that neither idea can be true. On the contrary, the 430 years started with Abram’s descent into Egypt in Genesis 12:10, and the 400 years of oppression started with Ishmael’s persecution of Isaac, which is referenced in Galatians 4:29.

These are what I call “less obvious literal interpretations” (AKA LOLIs). When you account for LOLIs, the Bible narrative and timeline turns out to be completely consistent and logical and, as I will discuss in a later article, shows evidence of being designed by God. But the Bible cannot make sense without accommodating LOLIs.

Second, scholars significantly misrepresent the strength of the scientific method. Consider, for example, how secular scientists will tell you that Darwinistic evolution is “proven.” This is nonsense, however, because you can’t prove a scientific theorem.

Unlike a mathematical theorem, where the entire set of data points can be captured abstractly, science concerns itself with empirical evidence. For example, we developed astronomy to explain (amongst other things) why the sun rises every morning. However, we have no way of “proving” that the sun will rise tomorrow. We can only “confirm” our astronomical model by showing that the results it predicts consistently come true as time goes on. But we cannot prove that the sun will rise tomorrow, any more than we can prove that a regular apple tree won’t randomly produce a bright blue apple or that any other expected natural phenomenon will come to pass. We can only produce a high degree of confidence that things will turn out a certain way.

Furthermore, scientific evidence functions like a puzzle. Imagine, for a second, you had a massive puzzle of a red dragon sitting in a field of grass against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. Imagine this puzzle was then split into a million pieces, and you were tasked with reassembling them without ever seeing the box. Could you not very easily come to believe at first that you were assembling a picture of a field of red flowers? Would you not be able to assemble with the small pieces the rough semblance of such a picture?

This is why accepted scientific theorems shift so drastically, instead of building incrementally in a logical fashion. Doctors or physicists or astronomers can have a completely wrong paradigm in place because that paradigm explains, say, 70% of all observed evidence. But they just can’t get it to explain the remaining 30%, and only when they completely tear down and reassemble the puzzle into something completely different can they get it up to, say, 80%.

This process has been in constant repetition since the scientific method became popular, and all Christians like me are saying is that the current puzzle can’t explain 100% of everything. In order to get closer to 100%, the picture will have to be torn down and reassembled, and I believe that it will only get close to 100% when the Bible’s literal implications are taken seriously.

That brings us to the third point, which is that scientists and historians do not give the Bible due consideration. Why? Because of what I discussed in the previous article about epistemology: namely, truth has moral implications. In America, we have built an elaborate system of academic research that receives significant funding and support from the government and that is full of non-believing researchers. Let’s explore a few reasons why there could be systemic error in such a system:

• The nonbelievers in the system would be inherently opposed to research that supported the Bible’s literal claims, because it would threaten the mechanisms they use to suppress the truth about God in their lives, as previously discussed.
• If they are funded by the government, scholars have a financial incentive to promote an intellectual system that justifies an overly large and powerful government (which is opposed by the Bible).
• Everyone entering an academic field through standard pathways is given the same biased framework as a default starting point. They will therefore be trying to fit all evidence they observe into that framework until they are forced through overwhelming evidence to undergo a paradigm shift (assuming they are intellectually honest enough to do so).
• Skeptics (especially deconstructed Christians) can see clearly how intellectually dishonestly many Christians behave to protect their flawed interpretations of the Bible. So why would we trust secular scientists and historians to be consistently honest and completely open to all questioning of their truth claims? Wouldn’t they be just as protective, narrow-minded, and opposed to questioning? What makes scholars more morally righteous than any other group of humans?
• Oftentimes there is not as much consensus around anti-Biblical scientific claims as scholars opposed to the Bible would have you believe. Once again, they have moral and financial reasons to portray certain types of science as settled, when they aren’t. They might even seek to punish those in their field who don’t follow the party line.
• There are flaws in certain kinds of scientific techniques used to “disprove” Biblical literalism. Consider radiocarbon dating, which supposedly dates artifacts with ages of up to 50,000 years. The validity of this method was originally tested by analyzing Egyptian tombs independently dated to between 2500 and 3000 BC (although I would suggest that the independent dating for even these dates is slightly flawed). However, this method has now been extrapolated far further back than we have any kind of independently determined dates. How can we know that there isn’t an acceleration of radiocarbon decay after 4000 years, or that there weren’t radical changes to the atmosphere prior to that point that would drastically change the level of radiocarbon (such as a global Flood)? The only way to confirm that the method is accurate up to 50,000 years before today is to test an artifact that we independently know to be 50,000 years old. But of course, we don’t have any such artifacts. Therefore, the entire application of carbon dating before the point at which we have an independently dated artifact is entirely speculative.
• Claims like “Darwinism is proven science” and “Christianity isn’t consistent with historical scholarship and archaeology” are too broad to objectively evaluate. Just like with religious claims, you would need to dig into each belief and theory and carefully analyze it to ensure there’s no lying, distortion, or unexamined error lurking therein.
• Intelligence does not guarantee correct beliefs. Being open-minded and objective requires wisdom, not intelligence. Brilliant people who are foolish can easily become convinced of something false. As a wise Christian once said (I cannot recall where I read this quote), “A crooked saw will never cut straight, no matter how much you sharpen it.” This is actually very good news, because not everyone is born with a high level of intelligence, but, according to the Bible, anyone can become wise by humbly asking God for wisdom (James 1:5).

Fourth and finally, the Bible’s specific approach to science and history has to be taken seriously. For example, the Bible classifies the various types of living creatures differently than modern science does. Skeptics can thus intentionally or unintentionally misconstrue the literal meaning of the Bible. Case in point, I once saw Ricky Gervais reject the Flood narrative on the grounds that there are too many kinds of spiders to fit on a boat of the size described in Genesis 6. However, Genesis 7:22 makes very clear that only creatures who breathed through their nostrils died in the Flood. Spiders do not have nostrils and do not have the “breath of life” described in the Flood narrative, because they breathe completely differently than humans do. Spiders and/or their egg sacks would have floated on the water and thus survived the Flood.

For a history example, I believe that the Bible claims that Alexander the Great overthrew Darius the Great. For this to be true, I would expect that the stories of the various Persian kings believed to have reigned between Darius and Alexander are actually all about Darius (which is made plausible by the fact that the Bible refers to Darius by three different names, which also happen to be the names of almost every single Persian king who supposedly followed him). Has any scholar of Persian and Greek history made a serious effort to evaluate this possibility?

Taking all these considerations into account, you may ask: why should you be expected to undertake this kind of revisionist inquiry into science and history? Two reasons: the weaknesses of naturalistic explanations of reality (such as Darwinistic evolution) and the incredible evidence of intelligent design in the Bible. I will discuss these in the next two articles in this series.